You Should Totally Play with Your Food

Chicken liver is a great learning tool! This week’s adventures in Bioseparations involved homogenizing chopped liver, using it to explore the high speed centrifuge and running our old friend the Bradford Assay on it.

We started by jumping into a mixed day of centrifuge lecture and preparation of homogenization buffer. After we were sufficiently oriented with the rules for using the centrifuge and how to operate it, we were able to spin our chicken liver samples. Once we had a loose pellet, we pipetted off the supernatant, and then spun that down again. We also used different samples to practice the Bradford Assay again. Serial dilutions. Math. Wow. It was awesome!!!

You'll have to take my word for it. There's a beautiful Bradford Assay gradient going on in those wells.

We also had some guest lecturers in Applied Quality Practice. They were particularly informative experts on risk and creating inputs and outputs. Examining our DNA extraction products for inherent risks and design inputs and outputs was the theme of the week.

The course for Applied Quality Practice was designed by PCC program directors in a hands-on collaboration with the local bioscience industry community. It’s an opportunity for employers to say definitively, this is what they need for graduates entering their workforce to know. There’s an interesting article about it featured PCC’s main page. Apparently, it was so interesting, that it was picked up by the Oregonian. I think that’s pretty sweet!